Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality by Sigmund Freud

Author:Sigmund Freud
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

Partial Drives and Erogenous Zones

If we put together what we have learned from our investigation of the positive and negative perversions, it seems reasonable to trace them back to a number of partial drives which, though not of a primary nature, are open to further analysis. In addition to a “drive,” which is not in itself sexual and which has its source in motor impulses, we can discern in the partial drives a contribution from an organ receiving stimuli (e.g., the skin, the mucous membrane, or a sense organ). An organ of this kind will be described here as an “erogenous zone”—as being the organ whose excitation lends the drive a sexual character. The part played by the erogenous zones is immediately obvious in the case of those inclinations to perversion that assign a sexual significance to the oral and anal orifices. These behave in every respect like a portion of the genital apparatus. In hysteria, these parts of the body and the tracts of mucous membrane branching out from them become the seat of new sensations and of changes in innervation in ways quite similar to what happens to the actual genitals under the excitations of the normal genital processes.

The significance of the erogenous zones as accessory apparatuses and surrogates for the genitals is, among all the psychoneuroses, most clearly apparent in hysteria. But this is not to imply that this significance should be considered any less in the other forms of illness. It is only that in them it is less recognizable, because in their case (obsessional neurosis and paranoia), symptom formation takes place in regions of the psychic apparatus that are more remote from the particular centers concerned with control over bodily functions. In obsessional neurosis, what is more striking is the significance of those impulses that create new sexual aims and seem independent of erogenous zones. Nevertheless, in the sexual pleasure derived from watching, and in exhibitionism, the eye corresponds to an erogenous zone; while in the case of the component of the sexual drive which involves pain and cruelty, the same role is assumed by the skin, which in particular parts of the body has become differentiated into sense organs and modified into mucous membranes, and is thus the erogenous zone par excellence.*

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